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Come, ring out our joy to the Lord; hail the God who saves us, alleluia.

Year: C(I). Psalm week: 1. Liturgical Colour: Green.

In other years: Saint Louis (1214 - 1270)

He became King of France (as Louis IX) at the age of 12. He was married and had eleven children, to whom he gave an excellent upbringing. He was noted for his spirit of prayer and penitence and for his love for the poor. He ran his kingdom not only to give peace to the people and economic stability but also for their spiritual good. He founded the Sorbonne and was a friend of St Thomas Aquinas. He was trusted by his fellow-rulers in Europe and often asked to arbitrate in their disputes. He undertook two unsuccessful crusades to liberate Christ’s burial-place and on the second of these he died, near Carthage, in the year 1270.

He was born in Aragón, received an excellent education and was ordained priest. After working in his own country for some time he went to Rome, where he worked for the education of the poor and founded a religious congregation for that purpose. His idea was that every child should receive an education. As one might expect, he was the object of much envy and calumny. He died in Rome in 1648.

St Mary of Jesus Crucified was born into a Greek-Catholic family of the Melkite Rite, at Ibellin, Galilee in 1846. Mary was orphaned at the age of two and raised by her uncle in Alexandria, Egypt. During that time, she was made to work as a house servant after refusing a marriage arranged by her uncle. After suffering violent abuse at the hands of another house servant, Mary escaped her uncle’s house and found work as a domestic servant elsewhere, working in Alexandria, Jerusalem and Beirut.

In 1862, she had moved to France with a family she was serving. In France, Mary discerned a vocation to the consecrated life. In 1867 she entered the Discalced Carmelites at Pau, France and was soon after sent with the founding group to the Carmel of Mangalore in India. She returned to France in 1872 and planned with her superiors to found a monastery in Bethlehem. In 1875 she went to the Holy Land where she built a monastery in Bethlehem and began planning for another at Nazareth. During the work of establishing the monasteries she fell and fractured her arm, which became gangrenous. Her health quickly declined and on the 26th August 1878, Mary died. She is noted for her supernatural gifts, especially for humility, for her devotion to the Holy Spirit, and her great love for the Church.

MT

Liturgical colour: green

The theological virtue of hope is symbolized by the colour green, just as the burning fire of love is symbolized by red. Green is the colour of growing things, and hope, like them, is always new and always fresh. Liturgically, green is the colour of Ordinary Time, the season in which we are being neither especially penitent (in purple) nor overwhelmingly joyful (in white).

What a man sows, he reaps. If he sows in the field of self-indulgence he will get a harvest of corruption out of it; if he sows in the field of the Spirit he will get from it a harvest of eternal life.